punt: v. [from the punch line of an old joke referring to
American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] 1. To give up,
typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie
tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this feature in,
but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided not to stay up
all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in
the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what
the Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3. A design
decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot
define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic
solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in
is -- we'll punt that for now." 4. To hand a tricky implementation
problem off to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to
get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system." 5.
To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a `punter'
thus, is a person or program that does this.
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